More than half of Nigeria’s 200 million population has no access reliable internet connection, especially those living in rural areas and Pan African Towers has a mission to reduce this gap by providing telecommunication infrastructure.
Awarded the Telecoms Infrastructure Company of the Year at Businessday’s 2020 Nigeria Business Leadership Awards, the indigenous telecommunication infrastructure company is positioning to provide high quality network connectivity to underserved areas in Nigeria and beyond.
Covid- 19 pandemic has miniaturised the world even further as it gave rise to a surging use of data and calls. Companies have re- engineered their business models to accommodate this sudden high impact on their businesses.
In spite of this surging demand, there were people who stood at a loss, who could not communicate or could not have access to quality education as a result of the impact of the coronavirus since schools were shut down in the country.
There were people who were further disconnected from the world because the infrastructure that they needed to communicate was not available. Their access to quality education, healthcare, banking services and other key areas of the economy was in serious jeopardy due to the absence of the infrastructure that will foster their access to these services.
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Okim-alobi Oyama, brand manager of Pan African Towers said “we want to be able to put smile on people’s faces when they are able to attend classes online, transact businesses using their banking apps without stepping a foot into the bank, have access to quality healthcare regardless of where they are and perform other fundamental activities that will ease their way of living.”
A recent research conducted by Datareportal showed that about 58 percent of Nigerians are unable to access the internet as a result of the unavailability of the adequate infrastructure that will foster this connectivity. These people live in areas across the country where access to network connectivity is challenging.
Providing infrastructure makes it possible for students to enjoy their right to quality education despite Covid-19. They would be able to receive classes virtually and COVID-19 would not be the reason they cannot acquire education if the infrastructure is on ground.
Pan African Towers has in two years worked persistently to shrink the telecom infrastructure gap capped at $136 billion through erecting adequate telecom infrastructures across the country. The company has built more than 1, 300 cell towers in Nigeria and Ghana and is innovatively positioned to expand that number tremendously in the next five years. The telecoms infrastructure company of the year award is a symbolism to the annotation that PAT is positioned to provide high quality network connectivity to underserved areas in Nigeria and beyond.
When asked what challenges businesses face in Nigeria, Okim responded that access to power, taxes, multiple fees, access to forex and vandalisations are some of the critical challenges we face in the telecom sector. Some rural communities are completely cut off from the world and to connect them to the world, high capital expenditure (CAPEX) is needed.
Okim said that backhaul, power and taxes accounted for about 60 percent of the cost of providing network connectivity to rural communities, and when this infrastructure is built in these communities, many of them are prone to thefts and vandalisations.
This means that the government needs to consider telecommunication as a critical infrastructure by passing the Critical Network Infrastructure (CNI) bill into law.
This legislation will protect telecom infrastructures across the country from vandals and thieves who will be punished and prosecuted as criminals under this law. It is also important to have uniform Right of Way charges implementation across the states in Nigeria. This uniformity in the implementation of ROW charges will help to reduce CAPEX and the savings re-channelled into more capital investments in telecom infrastructure.
Five states had implemented the reduction of the Right of Way charges with Ekiti state, taking the lead on this. If other states do not follow suit and reduce ROW charges to the agreed charges of about N145 per metre of fibre cable, then it would be like fitting square pegs into round holes because some of these cables pass through more than one state and if one of these states have not implemented the ROW fee reduction, it will still amount to high cost of building telecom infrastructures which will delay the move to bridge the telecom infrastructure gap in the country sooner.
